I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: consumers today are frustrated and tired of the same old tedious, stressful car-buying experience. According to a 2016 AutoTrader study, less than 1 percent of consumers prefer the current car-buying experience. Buying a vehicle is a highly emotional process. Consumers must consider whether or not they can afford the vehicle they love, if their choice is the best choice for their needs, whether they are getting a good deal, and ultimately, if they trust the dealer.

While consumers’ expectations continue to shift, additional digital retailing trends are putting added pressure on dealerships to adapt their processes and technology to better serve their customers.

So, how do we address these concerns and build a more sustainable future for dealerships?

1. Identify the important (and sometimes cumbersome) parts of buying a car in store, and build out their digital equivalents online

Shoppers today have indicated they want a change in the way they purchase vehicles – many do not want to negotiate. However, they do want to handle some of the pieces on their own, in the comfort of their homes. To stay relevant in the retail experience, it’s essential to tailor the technology your company utilizes to be “pro-customer.” The reason Blockbuster, taxis, and hotels are challenged by companies such as Netflix, Uber and AirBnB is because they weren’t focused on the real wants and needs of their customers. The moment more accessible options became available, their customers disappeared for good. Brand loyalty is extremely fickle – especially in retail.

Whether a shopper is payment driven, trade driven, credit focused, or protection oriented, every step to the final sale can be digitized and done on a tablet, on a couch or with a salesperson in-store — all with the help of good technology and process.

2. Understand the customer journey – the showroom is still key 

Contrary to popular belief, technology is not making brick and mortar retail obsolete. The true future of retail is at the intersection of e-commerce and brick and mortar. Eighty-three percent of in-market shoppers believe that simply doing something online will save them time – and 78 percent said they value the in-store experience. Shockingly, 70 percent of the millennials that we surveyed indicated they prefer to spend more time in the dealership. There are many different ways to add value to the shopper’s experience, but focusing on solutions for added convenience outside the dealership is not always the answer. To truly address the issue, it’s essential to creatively reimagine points of contention that can use tools that are already available. From there, you can either streamline to improve the in-store experience or take them out of the in-store process all together.

3. Build the right processes with the right people

Technology and applications are completely meaningless without people and process. Your leadership team needs to develop a strategy, implement new processes to meet the goals of the strategy, and begin to leverage the right providers that can enable those processes. This will help move you towards a digital retailing approach that is appropriate for your store.   

It takes solutions, people and processes to serve all our needs. When these three factors are all aligned, we have the capability to help move our industry forward in big ways. And in the end, successful digital retailing should create a trusted car-buying experience, reduce dealers’ costs, and sell more cars.  

In March 2018, Google made a change that could have a major impact on websites and how sites will rank on search engines. Google has begun “mobile-first indexing,” which means it now indexes the mobile version of a site rather than the desktop version of a website as it has done historically.  

What does this mean for your website?

Does your dealership prioritize content for the desktop version of your website?  If you do, your site may lose visibility in search results once Google indexes the mobile version of your site.

If you’re not sure what this means for your website, ask yourself: does the site content a shopper sees on their desktop screen match the content they see on their mobile phone?  If your website has a true responsive design you’re set to benefit from Google’s shift to mobile-first as your content is the same.

Here’s a simple test to check if your site will remain visible in the Google mobile-first web.

• Do a side-by-side comparison of your website on a mobile phone and a desktop computer
• View your homepage and other key pages, e.g. landing pages, promotional content, search results page, etc. 
• Does the content on your mobile site match the content on your desktop site? 

If your site content doesn’t match, your website provider is likely not offering you a true responsive web experience — the Google recommended design platform.

Based on Google’s recommendations, here are three ways to help your site benefit from the shift to mobile-first web:

1. Responsive over adaptive/agile

Websites built on a true responsive platform use a single version of content that scales in size to fit all screens: mobile, desktop, tablet, etc. A dealer with all their site content included in their mobile version will potentially be rewarded with a boost in Google search rankings.

In the mobile-first web, websites that are adaptive, seamless or agile could result in the dealer’s desktop content not being visible on a mobile phone, which puts the dealer at risk to not rank in search after Google indexes the dealer’s mobile site.

2. Use structured data categories

Structured data is a format that can help search engines understand the contents of a page/website.   Google also uses structured data to generate snippets to use in a shopper’s search results. Using different structured data categories such as vehicles, business information, hours and reviews, etc. can help a site rank higher in Google search results.

3. Optimize the hero for mobile-first

The hero is a dealer’s marquee for attracting a shopper’s attention and clicks.  However, some dealers impede their site’s performance and speed by using large PNG files for the hero. To ensure a site continues to perform well and shoppers enjoy fast page load speeds, your hero image should be a jpeg file that’s less than 120kbs in size and can easily fit key screen sizes.

The Google updates aren’t arbitrary; they reflect a shift in consumer shopping behavior that has been growing for years. In prioritizing mobile websites over desktop, Google is legitimizing this shift in consumer behavior.

If you’re unsure your website will take advantage of Google’s new updates, reach out to me.  Our CDK team will help you optimize your site so you can benefit from the move to the mobile-first web.

Are you doing all you can to engage those shoppers that are ‘Ready To Buy’?

The stakes are high: sales are slipping, your competition is stiff, and today’s shoppers are the most savvy yet.

But there’s good news – there are a segment of shoppers that are 4x more likely to buy a car than other shoppers.  They’re called ‘Likely Buyers’ and you can target them.  

How to Spot a “Likely Buyer”

Roughly 29 percent of today’s shoppers are likely buyers.3 So, how do you tell them apart from other digital automotive shoppers? On average, we found they have:

• 43 percent more page views
• 90 percent more time on site
• 52 percent more inventory searches
• 62 percent more vehicle views

Likely Buyers leave their digital tracks in many places. A range of different signals determine their intent to buy, including; vehicle page views, brand site visits, models considered on dealer’s websites and car research sites including Edmunds, CarGurus, KBB, the OEM sites as well as dozens of auto-related ad network partners such as Amazon, Google and Facebook.  

While your shoppers are jumping around the web - do you track their actions and turn the data into valuable insights you can use to help target your most Likely Buyers? Take advantage of a data ecosystem that plugs into a variety of different sites and pulls together the information you need to determine which customers are most likely to convert.

Personalize Their Experience

What if you had access to the data and shopper insights, including the sales and services data from your own DMS, CDK website and your advertising activities/investment. You could apply those insights to tailor your digital experiences per shopper to grow your sales conversion rates.

Personalization is powerful: Amazon, Netflix, and other leading ecommerce dealers are already taking advantage. They deliver customized shopper experiences – because it works. Amazon’s recommendation engine generates 35 percent of the ecommerce front-runner’s revenue, and 75 percent of all Netflix users select movies based on recommendations - including me. 2

When a dealer personalizes their shoppers’ digital experience, we see significant increases in shopper engagement including 2 times more return visitors, they’re 53 percent more likely to view a VDP and 60 percent more likely to search your inventory.3

If you take it one step further and personalize deals to target likely buyers, we see an even more significant jump. When targeted, dealers saw a 90 percent lead submission rate increase from likely buyers for key lead conversion forms.3

Tip of the Personalization Iceberg

But the power of likely visitors doesn’t stop at personalization. Between known customers in your DMS/CRM, website visitors and likely buyers – you’ve got a powerful mix of customer information on your hands. Leveraging machine learning and tools like Facebook’s “look alike audience,” you can begin to optimize for potential customers who are likely buyers, and surface ads that include a strong call to action. When our dealers followed this process, they saw a 230 percent increase in website engagement, 121 percent higher click-through rate and a 71 percent lower cost-per-click.3

Likely buyers are already out there. But having the tools and strategy to find them, personalize their experience and drive conversions is not as easy to come by. If you don’t already have a process to capture and convert likely buyers, reach out to someone at CDK Global to learn more about how we can implement such a strategy in your dealership. 

1 Gigamon.com, 2017

2 Venturebeat.com, 2016

3 CDK Global Business Intelligence, 2016

Facebook has aggressively been pursuing various opportunities to drive new revenue for their business, and has been doing so by finding more and more ways to help other businesses find success (something we’re also passionate about). One of the more recent ways they’ve sought to do so is through their platform, Facebook Marketplace; a tool that allows people and businesses to post different items they have for sale and allow consumers to complete the majority of the purchasing process directly on Facebook. Recently, Facebook took this one step further and announced that they would be adding an automotive marketplace. Facebook partnered with a handful of companies exclusively to provide the integration with their platform: Edmunds, Cars.com, Auction123, CDK Global and Social Dealer. We took it one step further and partnered with a leading chat vendor, ActivEngage, to create a differentiated solution for dealers. With these new capabilities and partnerships, how do you leverage this new way to sell?

1. Share Your Used Inventory on Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace has been a growing resource for people looking to buy used cars, but until recently, the transactions were not always trustworthy. With the new announcement, dealerships are able to add their inventory to the marketplace – providing a trustworthy way for customers to find the right vehicle. However, most dealerships don’t have someone who can dedicate time to uploading inventory to the platform every day. CDK automatically provides a nightly feed of updated used inventory to Facebook, a technology exclusive to the five companies that partnered with Facebook.

2. Connect Facebook Marketplace with Your Chat Provider

Putting your inventory on Facebook is a great first step, but don’t be fooled into thinking that consumers are going to find your inventory on Facebook and then give you a call. Consumers want to complete as much of the transaction as they can without jumping to another channel. The obvious next step for a consumer interested in a vehicle is to Facebook message a dealership, so be sure that your chat provider is integrated with Facebook marketplace. At CDK, we partnered with the chat provider ActivEngage to connect customers who reached out via Facebook messenger. During the month of November, 42 percent of chats initiated through Facebook featured standard lead activity like a phone number or email. (Hint, hint … CDK Global not only syndicates your inventory but facilitates integrating your chat partner.)

3. Take the Next Step with the Customer

Once a consumer finds a car they’re interested in and reaches out to you via chat, take the opportunity to create an actionable next step. If they have questions about the vehicle, answer them directly in the chat. If they’re interested in test driving the vehicle, set up an appointment. Ask for their information and add them as a lead in your CRM, starting them on the journey to buying a car at your dealership.

The ability to integrate with Facebook, and provide all of the necessary connections to provide a seamless experience for the customer, is one that is currently exclusive to CDK Global. If you want to learn more about the program, check out our website. GM dealers, take the next step with us by enrolling today.

Have you implemented this into your digital marketing strategy? Tell us about it here!

Remember the days when dealerships’ commercials owned the radio airwaves? And for that matter, the TV airwaves? A dealership’s jingle or tagline could be repeated by almost anyone; even children could identify a dealership from their commercials. It was great for name recognition, but dealerships were spending a lot of time and money reaching everyone for the sake of reaching just a few in-market shoppers. Those kids who could sing the local dealership jingle weren’t likely to take advantage of the promotion the dealership was actually trying to advertise. But that was just the cost of doing business— until digital advertising, and now social media came along. 

Now, 42 percent of advertisers plan to scale back or eliminate TV spend.* Why? They’re turning to digital advertising platforms like Facebook instead. Sixty percent of SMB advertisers are advertising on Facebook, a drastic jump from the 33 percent that were advertising in 2015.* Many dealers already know why Facebook is powerful — it helps you to reach your customers where they already spend a significant amount of time and allows for hyper-targeting. But Facebook is only powerful if you know how to leverage the platform. You’re already on Facebook, but here are four ways to do it better.

Start with Your Goal

Before you go any further, think about the goal of your Facebook advertising campaign. Are you trying to share Service promotions with customers whose warranty is about to expire? Do you want to bring new customers into your dealership? Understand your goal first and the decisions that follow will all flow from there.  

Maximize Your Bid

Now that you’ve identified your goal, start developing your campaign. When you create a campaign, you first must select what your advertising goal is, and what kind of ads you’ll create. Are you driving website clicks? Optimizing to conversion goals? Looking for page likes? Brand awareness? (If you choose the option “conversion,” you’ll have to think through what a conversion looks like and set up the appropriate pixels on your website to track the conversion.) Once you’ve selected your ad type, think about how you’ll bid. Test different biding options like optimizing to “Visit” instead of just a “click”.  Or an even better technique of bidding to a “VDP View”. Some out-of-the-box platforms can optimize your campaign for customers that are “buyers”. Again, these will ladder up to your overall campaign goal.

Focus on Creative – Pick the Right Ad

Now that you’ve identified your goal, think through the creative that would drive your target audience to take the action you want. Imagine yourself in their shoes. What are the types of ads you would click on? First and foremost, choose high-quality, eye-catching imagery that will stop the scroll. Then think about what words will work best — you can change the ad copy, link title and link description to further entice customers to click through. But it doesn’t end with a click. Ensure that customers actually take the action you intend by connecting the initial impression all the way through the final action you want them to take.

Find the Right Audience

Next, it’s time to choose your audience, which should align with your goal. While Facebook allows for granular targeting, it’s important to weigh the trade-off between strict and broad targeting. While strict targeting ensures you’re reaching exactly the customers you wish, you might be missing out on potential new customers if you get too specific. Instead, test different audiences by targeting in different ways — for instance, target with custom lookalike audiences, retarget website visitors or target those likely to be in market. Facebook’s off-the-shelf targeting options will only take you so far. If you want to get the right mix, consider modeling your audiences from data you already own, like those already in your DMS or CRM.  An advanced method is to find new customers who look like actual buyers at your dealership. This method isn’t found in the standard Facebook console. (Hint, CDK Global is really good at this.)

When you’re building your next Facebook advertising campaign, consider these tips and you’re likely to see a drastic boost in engagement and a greater return on investment. And if you need help better understanding all that Facebook advertising has to offer and how to take advantage of it, we’re always here to help.

*Borrell Research, 2016

In November of 2016, Google announced their push to a mobile-first focus for how they rank search results. With over half of searches occurring on mobile, Google has realized the importance of focusing on the search experience on a mobile screen, and is making updates accordingly.

Within the search results, Google lists out relevant local businesses in what they call the local pack. For each business, the searcher would see hours for that day, their Google review ratings, links to the website and driving directions. Clicking on a business name displays the full knowledge graph, or the individual Google Business listing.

Google has begun rolling out a revamp of the local pack

Star ratings and hours are still displayed, but the website links and driving directions are gone. Google has replaced those with the preferred photo. Google defines the preferred photo as the photo that you want your customers to see alongside your business name on Google Maps and Search.

What does this mean for your dealership?

Your featured photo and star rating are more important than ever.

Along with your location, they are the differentiating features that are immediately available to help a consumer make a decision about which dealership to choose.

With Google’s update, a consumer now has to click twice to access the dealership’s website. Now they have to choose a dealership from the search results, click on that dealership, and then click again to access the website. If your photo and star rating doesn’t capture their attention, the likelihood of them making that second click drops dramatically, and with it, so do your organic search results.

With that in mind, you need to select a photo that tells your story and is easily recognizable to customers. Since these photos now show on the mobile local pack results, you need to make sure it’s a photo that scales well for any screen.

If you’re a dealership with access to the Google My Business profile, you can log in today and upload your preferred photo. If you don’t select your preferred photo yourself, Google will select one for you. Google will source this photo from other user uploads or select a photo that their algorithm thinks is relevant to your business. This profile photo is now your calling card on Google. Shouldn’t you control what your customers see?

Your star rating is also key. The difference between a 4.5 and a 4.7 rating might be the deciding factor for a customer. Managing your reputation both in the dealership and online is essential to your success.

Google updates their platform often to accommodate customers’ constantly changing needs. Make sure your strategy is just as agile.

When you think of an ugly website, you might think of blocks of text, comic sans, too many colors, or functions that fail to account for user experience. But these sites don’t just make your eyes bleed — they fail to achieve the goal of the site in the first place (unless, of course, your goal is to be the world’s worst website ever).

A website should be beautiful, but more importantly, it should be beautiful in order to accomplish your business goals. If you’re a photographer, your website should showcase your best work and lead others to request bookings. If you’re a car dealer, your website should capture the attention of potential customers and ultimately lead them into your dealership.

As shoppers become more and more comfortable online, they have higher expectations for the companies they interact with online. With that in mind, the marriage of design, user experience and purpose has become increasingly important.

Don’t Forget About the User

According to the Mary Meeker Internet Trends report, “consumers’ expectations that they can get what they want with ease and speed will continue to rise.” If a site isn’t easy to navigate, 94 percent will abandon the site, and if it doesn’t load in less than five seconds, 62 percent are gone. Users are also increasingly mobile; in fact, 1 in 4 car purchasers turn to mobile to research vehicles every day. Providing a responsive and easily navigable website experience is essential to keeping shoppers on your website, whether they’re on mobile or a high-end widescreen monitor.

A Match Made in Heaven: Purpose and Design

Art is beautiful, design is beauty with purpose. A website shouldn’t look nice simply to attract customers, (though that is important), it should drive consumers to action. Marrying your design to what your consumer wants immediately increases the odds that they will choose your dealership. When car dealership sites personalize their content based on their shoppers (e.g. personalization), dealers experienced a 28 percent increase in likely buyers.1 In addition, featuring click-to-call buttons or other actionable features drives more measurable ROI than your designer saying “Well, it looks great!”

Changing your design to align with your business goals, like swapping out content to align with the marketing in your showroom or featuring specials on your homepage, allows you to use design to help boost your bottom line. Being able to do that quickly and simply means one less headache for you.

The days of just being online are over. It’s not enough to just be present, you have to be competitive. And in order to do so, you need to aim for the trifecta: user experience, purpose and design.

Does your website measure up? Check out our Next Gen Websites and see how the combination of these three elements can make a difference for your dealership.

1 CDK Data Science, 2016

Fifty years ago, advertising decisions had to be made with a limited set of measures to guide decisions. Ad campaigns were chosen based upon the potential number of eyes or ears that might see or hear an ad, so measurements were based upon things like viewer ratings or total newspaper subscriptions. A lot of decisions came down to creative directors making a “gut call.” Everything was put in print, billboards, or on TV or radio because that’s just what you did. How did you know if a campaign was working? Generally, you noted if your sales increased and people said nice things about you. Concrete results were elusive.

But those days are long gone. Cookies, URL tags and website analytics allow marketers to track a potential customer all the way from discovery to sale. Google recently published a case study on one consumer’s path to purchasing a car, and there were 900+ interactions. With this massive amount of data, marketing decisions no longer need to be left up to chance. However, finding the right measurement can still be difficult. With all of these touchpoints, how do you determine the right mix of marketing to make the sale?

What’s it All About? Last-click, view-through (a.k.a deferred) and multitouch conversions

As any marketer knows, promoting your business needs a robust strategy. And depending on your intended audience, that strategy plays out in many different channels. As found in the Google case study, a shopper may go to your website, see a banner ad, click on a social post and search “dealers near me” all before they take an action that signals their intent to buy. As a result, a strong marketing and advertising strategy needs to take an integrated approach and simultaneously spread your message across many channels. But how do you find the right mix?

This is where attribution comes in. Being able to attribute an action to a marketing tactic can inform you which marketing tactics are successful and which you should continue to spend money on. With technology advancements, there are many different ways you can track advertising attribution, and many experts are still having conversations about which is the most beneficial.

Some argue that the most important marketing is that which makes someone act immediately. Last-click conversion attribution attributes the conversion to whichever marketing tactic caused someone to take action. Was it a banner ad click that led someone to fill out a lead form? If so, the banner ad would get the credit for the conversion.

Some argue that clicks aren’t the only option. Consumers might not know to click and instead use organic search to find the advertiser. In this case, the last ad viewed is what matters. These are considered view-through or deferred conversions.

Others argue that a customer taking action is the result of the sum of all of their previous interactions with a brand, including those where they might not have directly engaged. In these interactions, every marketing tactic that a customer came in contact with during their purchasing process gets a piece of the credit. This is known as multitouch attribution conversion.

Taking Digital Attribution One Step Further

Tracking attribution one time ended in the digital space. Taking action offline isn’t as easily attributable to online ad placements, but it is possible. Companies like CDK Global are thinking of ways to track offline actions back to their online sources. For instance, we developed our advertising solution to swap a unique, attributable phone number for the dealership’s regular number whenever a customer is delivered an ad placement. As a result, the last-clicked ad gets the credit for the attribution. In addition, our system takes it one step further and tracks the view-through conversion attribution to give a full view of the value of an ad placement. We even offer different attribution models for different dealership needs and recently expanded our capabilities to accommodate other dealer choice models like last-click only and multitouch conversions.

Making the best decision for your dealership

Ultimately, deciding which attribution model to use in your reporting depends on what your goals are as a business. In order to determine what you should measure, take a step back from crunching numbers and ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to evaluate which channels you should invest more money in with the simplest math, last-click only conversions might be the best answer. However, if you’re concerned with how your overall ad placement strategy is impacting your last-click conversions, view-through and multitouch conversions might be a better option. A best practice is to look at both models and use them as a guide for your decisions.

Whichever you decide, take advantage of your data and choose the attribution model that has the greatest impact on your business. Work with your advertising vendors to develop the strategies that best suit your needs before you brainstorm creative marketing. Attribution may be confusing, but cracking the code can mean huge returns for your dealership. Take your time to understand it and it will pay off in the long run.

Google is constantly reviewing and evaluating the look and feel of their search engine to provide a better user experience, but this often results in changes that affect your business. Changes like featuring fourads instead of three can impact how your business shows up in search queries. Combining paid search and SEO is the one-two punch that will keep your dealership top-of-mind and at the top of the search results.  

So what’s new this time?

A few months ago, Google made changes to their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) by eliminating right column ad results and adding a fourth result to some queries. It doesn’t seem significant, but it means less opportunity (and more competition) to get your brand in front of consumers as they browse the results page. Think about it: how often do you scroll down to see the sixth, sixtieth, six thousandth result of your search? You don’t. So what’s a dealer to do?

Get Ahead of the Pack 

There are a few ways to put your dealership on top: paid search ads, local pack map results and organic search listings.  Combining strong SEO and Search Advertising will help position your brand —and specific offerings — in place to reach the top.

1. Focus on Transactional Queries

These are “highly commercial” queries, or searches that tend to show purchase intent. For example, if you’re searching for a place to get an oil change for your Mazda,  you’d type in “Mazda Oil Change.” Research shows these types of searches are “six times more likely than other searches” to display in the NEW top four display format.  Here are some tips to get you to the top:

• Be Specific: Include as much relevant detail in your paid search ad copy as possible, including model names, offers, events, and dealership taglines.
• Utilize Links:  Site links guide customers to areas of the website specific to what they’re searching for, such as service offers and sales events, dealership hours and directions, specific model details, etc.
• More is Better: Building more information in your ad makes it easier for shoppers to navigate to your website, and maximizes the space you occupy in the paid section of search results.

2. Make the Map

Once you’ve figured out the secret to popping to the top of paid search queries, you need to consider making the most of the Google “Local Pack” map results. This is a great way to reinforce your proximity to the consumer and set yourself apart from the competition.  Here are a few ways to make sure your dealership makes the map: 

• Update your Listings: Don’t neglect Google My Business listings and other local pack (map) influences. It may be a small task, but make sure to fill-out all the categories in your Google My Business listing. This is where Google goes first to figure out what to include on the map.
• Consistency is Key: Make sure your name, address, phone number and URL are up-to-date across the web. The more information you can send to Google about where you are and what you offer, the more it learns where you should appear in those map listings.
• Know your ‘Hood: Consider how far your customers drive to purchase a vehicle with you. Focusing on areas within a reasonable distance of your dealership increases the effectiveness of your advertising. Conversely, attempting to cover too large of an area may spread your budget too thin and increase your competitive set.

3. Staying Organic

A good local search strategy is just part of the organic side of the equation. Organic searches, those that surface to the top because they provide the most relevant content, remain prominent on all search engines. SEO teaming/advertising coordination comes into play too.

• Tie it Together: Optimize ad landing pages so they include content related to your ad copy. This drives relevancy and make a stronger case for Google to suggest you.
• The More the Merrier: Build out landing pages about specific models, makes or service offerings. The more pages with content, the more likely Google is to pick you up.
• Blog Away: Create content that is relevant to your customers and your dealership. Don’t get pitchy. Share information that your customers would want to read – Google filters quality content to the top.

While Google is a complicated beast, it’s also pretty easy to please. If you follow these steps, your dealership’s name will be plastered all over Google’s front page and consumers won’t be able to miss you. If you like to relax, our teams can help you maximize your Search Advertising and SEO.

Make sure you’re getting your piece of the national advertising pie

What if your local TV station rep told you that for every dollar you put toward your television ad buy, they would match it with ten thousand dollars of bonus media on their dime? Would you do it?

That’s exactly the kind of ”easy money” advantage OEMs offer you, the dealer.  Because OEM’s allow you to integrate their million-dollar ad campaigns into your own local marketing, you have a unique “plug and play” solution for easy profits.  You’d be crazy not to take advantage, but how do you actually get your piece of the pie?

How do you know what promotions the OEM is planning, and when? How can you figure out which national campaigns are tied to your inventory?  How do you get a hold of the OEM advertising collateral you’d need to integrate into your own website? This three-part series offers a down-and-dirty guide to making alignment actionable so you can bring easy money into your dealership.

Part 1: Set up Your Alignment Intelligence

1. The most obvious place to start when looking to align your advertising is the OEM portal.  These portals are goldmines for finding out about upcoming campaigns, new models, seasonal promotions and more. Many OEM portals feature an OEM commercial video detailing the latest and greatest advertising campaigns.

2. Contact your OEM area representative. Yes, they want you to take cars, but they also have a direct line to the OEM campaigns. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the OEM portal, or would simply prefer to work with a real person, the OEM area representative can be a great resource.

3. Turn on your TV. This option is certainly the most fun. Next time you’re vegging out in front of The Amazing Race, pay attention to the commercials that come on. Is one of them for an OEM promotion featuring inventory you yourself possess? What are you waiting for? Grab those assets, integrate them into your website, and wait for the crowds to pour in to your dealership.

4. Get a little help from your friends. The last great OEM resource is none other than your friends in the industry. Whether it’s through a 20 group, your dealer bowling league, or the next industry mixer, seek out non-competitive dealers and ask them what promotions they are running in the near future. A tip from an industry buddy could lead to easy money for you as well. Score!